The first fundamental assumption of haiku economics
is: Less is more and more is better. The idea seems to be catching on with
financial traders as much as with poets and political speechwriters. The
unemployed, it seems, can't resist it, and more than a few economists (heedless
of Bentham) have put pens to verse.

Last week (July 2nd, 2009) brought a fine
introductory article on "haiku
economics," by Erica Alini, at the Real Time Economics blog of The Wall
Street Journal.

In May I was interviewed -- in haiku form -- by the
Chronicle of Higher Education (Steve Kolowich); there followed from the (fun to
do) Chronicle interview three separate appearances on National Public Radio.
Inspired by my interview, NPR issued a "recession
haiku challenge."

The outpouring of hundreds of haiku about
economics, written by NPR listeners, was rather shocking, even to NPR, the
journalists said. News of the NPR haiku-economic explosion has spread by
now to many other sites related and unrelated to public radio. For example:

Vinca LaFleur, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton who now
blogs at the West Wing Writers' Podium Pundits, has picked up on it.

On Dec. 31, 2008 The Wall Street Journal (Mary Pilon) did a page one article on the nationwide outpouring of haiku and other short verse and
again my work was featured.

In August or September of 2008 Freakonomics/New York Times issued a
haiku-economic challenge to which hundreds of economists and others
responded.

By way of introduction, I first learned haiku from
a friend and adopted teacher, Etheridge Knight (1931-1991), a great American and
African American poet with whom I was in close contact between 1987 and 1991.
This was in Indianapolis, back in the days before Robert Bly was a household
name and well before Yusef Komunyaaka had been to Princeton or had won a
Pulitzer Prize and so through Etheridge and his companion, the poet Elizabeth
McKim, I got to know the underbelly of an important body of American poetry,
haiku included. (Etheridge Knight's teacher was Gwendolyn Brooks, a U.S.
Poet Laureate from Chicago. She discovered Knight while he was serving
time at the Indiana State Pen, in the early 1960s.)

Etheridge used to urge me to put haiku and
economics together. I told him yes, and then I went into another world - -
into a Ph.D. program not in the Writers' Workshop but in Economics!

About 10 years later, in 2001, I was teaching econ
at Georgia Tech in Atlanta when I began to understand how these two arts and
sciences fit together, and I've been writing and teaching "haiku economics" ever
since. Now, a few years on, I see that haiku and economics converge more than
they collide at the level of principles, or so I argue.

Haiku economics won't solve all our aching
problems. But, as I argue in my forthcoming article, haiku can and does
serve as more than economic pain relief, 17 syllables at a time, plus or minus a
small standard deviation!

The first fundamental assumption of haiku economics
is: Less is more and more is better. The idea seems to be catching on with
financial traders as much as with poets and political speechwriters. The
unemployed, it seems, can't resist it, and more than a few economists (heedless
of Bentham) have put pens to verse.